Galatasaray loanee Hakim Ziyech has hit out at Chelsea over their transfer policy under owner Todd Boehly as players “ran out of patience”.
Chelsea paid around £34m to sign the 30-year-old from Ajax before the 2020/21 campaign.
Ziyech was one of the standout attackers in the Eredivisie during his time at Ajax but he has failed to live up to expectations at Stamford Bridge.
The Morocco international only managed to grab six goals and nine assists in his 64 Premier League outings for the Blues before he was loaned out to Galatasaray in the summer.
Ziyech has enjoyed a strong start to this season with the Turkish giants and he scored a brace in their 3-3 draw against Manchester United in the Champions League group stage in midweek.
Ziyech was part of the Chelsea side that endured a miserable season in 2022/23 as they finished 12th in the Premier League. Their mass recruitment gave Graham Potter and Frank Lampard too many options to choose from and Mauricio Pochettino is yet to fully steady the ship.
The winger thinks Chelsea’s transfer policy was “asking for problems” as players “ran out of patience”.
“We had three teams there with top players,” Ziyech told Voetbal International.
“At a certain point, we run out of patience. A selection with 40 players for one team is simply far too much and is asking for problems.”
Ziyech added: “Pff, Chelsea, we can talk about that for a long time.
“But the conclusion is that things did not turn out as we had hoped. It was a period full of coaching changes, nagging with the club management, a departure to Paris Saint-Germain that did not happen at the last minute and it was disappointing in terms of football.”
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Romelu Lukaku was also loaned out in the summer as he joined Serie A giants AS Roma. Chelsea legend Joe Cole thinks this deal proves that there is “something fundamentally wrong with the club”.
“You here all the buzzwords around the club but at the end of the day, we can’t score goals,” Cole told TNT Sports.
“With Romelu Lukaku, for all of his faults, he was in the door. He was a success at Inter Milan, he scored goals at Everton and West Brom in this country, why couldn’t he score goals at Chelsea? What was wrong [with him?]
“He is scoring goals now for Roma. So we have to look within ourselves, what is wrong with this club at the moment? The squad is unbalanced, but there is something wrong fundamentally with the club at the moment.”
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